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Google+ – It’s only the beginning

September 21, 2011 By 1 Comment

Bam!

There it is. Right on the front page of the world’s largest search engine. Largest, as in hundreds of millions of searches per day, that is. And every visitor is now seeing a big bold blue arrow pointing their way to Google+, which is now open to all comers.

And in case you didn’t notice the big blue arrow, there’s also a little note under the search box.

And it’s more than a social network

When Google announced the open beta program yesterday on their blog, they highlighted the fact that the Google+ initiative is still in its early stages. Specifically, they noted that 100 improvements had been introduced in the about 100 days since the product launched in a limited fashion. The message is clear: this is only the beginning.

What’s striking about the list of the latest changes on that blog post, I think, is the non-social aspect of some of the changes. Yes, they’re social, but they’re not Facebook social. Things like participating in video calls from your smartphone, sharing and collaborating on documents, and search have social aspects to them, but they’re really business applications. And that’s what makes the Google+ play more interesting right now.

People don’t need another social network. But they do need better ways to communicate, collaborate, and find the best stuff that people are sharing.

If you haven’t joined Google+ yet to see what all the fuss is about, now seems like a good time. If you want to catch up on some reading about the platform, you can check out my series of posts on Google+ right here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The key to navigating Google+ is the keyboard

August 10, 2011 By 1 Comment

The Google+ stream can seem a bit daunting to navigate. Posts are much longer than on Twitter. They can be several paragraphs long, in fact, and many have photos or videos embedded. Then there’s a section for the +1 counts and the comments.

Viewing your stream through circles, the main filtering mechanism in Google+, can help you focus on updates from certain groups of people you follow. But that doesn’t make it any easier to navigate through posts. It’s still a lot of scrolling.

Unless you use the two magic keyboard shortcuts J and K.

When viewing your stream, you can click on the J key on your keyboard to immediately pop down to the next item.This makes it much easier to browse through posts quickly and efficiently. If you’ve gone two quickly, you can easily pop back up through posts one at a time by using the K key.

If you stop on a post and want to comment, just hit Enter. You will automatically be brought to the bottom of the post and a comment box will be opened for you.

If you need to scroll up and down a long stream for some reason, and don’t want to keep hitting J and K over and over again, you can just hold down the Space bar to scroll down or Shift + the Space bar to scroll up.

Photo credit: swishphotos

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Polls via +1, another nice little innovative use of Google+

August 4, 2011 By 2 Comments

It’s fun to watch a new platform evolve. Not only to see new features and functions as imagined by the creators, but also the way in which people figure out interesting ways to use it.

I’ve seen some neat things with Google+. I wrote about a couple previously here: 2 Awesome Video Innovations on Google+, a post that describes a game show and a yoga class run on the Google+ video collaboration feature called a “hangout.”

Here’s another neat idea: using the +1 system to quickly and easily take a poll, as shown in the screen shot below. You make a post and then add comments representing the selections for your poll. After that, each respondent can +1 a comment. Their +1s are automatically talleyed and displayed.

It’s not sophisticated, but it’s simple and effective. A nice little innovative use of Google+.

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How to search Google+ – simple and advanced

July 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment

For all its wonder and glory (for those of us who are still enamored with the new platform), Google+ is weak in a suprising area – search. Yes, the company that made the world’s largest search engine left this feature out of its new social media offering.

Search is not prominent on many social media platforms (though I think it should be – it’s incredibly handy). It’s hard to find old stuff on Facebook (lots of scrolling required), and Twitter requires you to go to a different web page to conduct a search. Still, Google+ seems like it should be different. And maybe it will be someday. It’s still in its infancy, after all. Fortunately, there is an easy workaround.

Google to the rescue

For now, it is possible to search Google+ quite easily from google.com. There is a simple parameter that can be typed into the familiar search box that tells the mighty Google search engine to limit a search result to a specific web site.

All you need to do is add the phrase site:plus.google.com to your search and all of the results will come from Google+.

Using this technique can help you find people and posts you might be interested in, or to find something you’d read before and forgot to bookmark.

Use liberally

Note that this handy little technique can be used on any website. Often Google has a better index of the information than the site itself. And many websites aren’t easy to navigate when you’re looking for a specific peice of information.

So, if you’re looking for a particular bit of information on the Ikea site, for instance, it can be easier to search for something by adding the site:ikea.com phrase to a Google search than it is to navigate through the menu systems or the site’s built in search engine.

Advanced technique

Refining your search a bit further may make it easier for you to hone in on exactly what you’re looking for. For example, if you’re looking for a word or phrase that is contained in a post on Google+ (and not anywhere else), you can use add another phrase to your search:

post

The inurl:/posts phrase limits the search to results that contain /posts in the url, which is true for each post on Google+ (so everything else is excluded).

Similarly, you could search for something just on About pages. Say you were looking for people who listed “Boston” somewhere on their About page. You’d modify the search to look like this:

about

This technique can be helpful to find people in a specific geographic area, or maybe employed at a certain company, or who attended a certain school – provided they’ve listed it publicly on their About page.

More advanced

As you can see, the google.com search engine is very powerful and can be a huge aid in finding stuff on Google+. You can experiment with these techniques to see if they are helpful. And, if you want to really dig further into advanced search techniques – you can find a good list of these “search operators” over here. Happy searching.

Photo credit: Igor

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Google Plus and the lure of notifications

July 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Which is worse – the notification alert that lures you back into Google+ because someone is circling you, mentioning you, or interacting with a post or comment of yours – or – the dull, grey notification bar with a big zero on it, reminding you that nobody is circling you, mentioning you, or interacting with a post or comment of yours?

The lure of notifications

Notifications can be hard to ignore, but they are terrible distractions. They take away something more important than time – they take away attention.

Paying attention to something, even for a split second, has a lingering effect – I wonder what that was? Maybe somebody liked my witty comment on that post from this morning? Maybe Suzi just joined Google+ and circled me. Or maybe someone shared that post I worked so hard to craft with just the right words.

All of this distracts from your task at hand, whatever that may be. It’s for this reason that a long time ago I shut off my email notifications for good. I haven’t looked back on that one yet, and don’t anticipate doing so.

The reach of Google+ notifications

What’s a little different about notifications on Google+ is that the controls are a bit more limited. Sure, you can turn off email notifications as well as notifications to your phone if you’re using the mobile client. But, that little box in the upper right hand corner of your web browser gives no quarter. Even when you’re not on the Google+ page, it’s still there – across all Google products – web, gmail, calendar, docs, photos, reader, and more!

That’s the significant difference of Google+ as a new communications platform for those of us who are already users of these other products (and there are at least about 200 million of us). And it’s in this way that I think Google+ will infiltrate our daily workflow in a way that other platforms like Facebook or Twitter didn’t and couldn’t. This thought resonates with another idea that is worth some consideration – that social media will at some point cease to exist as a standalone product or platform and simply become a feature of computing in the future. That’s getting a little ahead of ourselves, but you get the idea.

There may be some respite for the weary

There is a browser extension (Hide Google+ Notification) that promises to remove the notification from the global Google header toolbar for all pages except Google+ itself, but it’s only for Chrome users. Maybe more will follow for other browsers, or maybe Google will offer this as a configuration option (don’t hold your breath). But for now, you may need to avoid Google properties if you don’t want to be distracted by the notifications. Of course, this may prove to be about as easy as avoiding all discussion of your favorite TV show until you watch the recording when you get home.

The immediacy of the social web

The pace of social media is different. And for all of the talk about Google+ competing with Facebook, it also has some of the real-time feel of Twitter. This may increase as newer users are drawn into this pace by the notification bar, and continue to up the pace overall. Tempering all that activity with circles will surely be a minimum requirement over time.

 

 

Filed Under: Google+, Productivity Tagged With: , , , ,

Beyond circles: How to get rid of more noise on Google+ with Muting and Blocking

July 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

One of the nice things about Google+ is the ability to take your attention away from things easily. And this is important, because sometimes ignorance really is bliss sometimes. Or at least it’s more efficient to be able to ignore the stuff you really don’t want to see.

Muting

One feature of Google+ that I’ve used a lot is muting. There are some posts that you are just not interested in. So, you can mute them.

There is a little pull down arrow on the top right of each post. If you click it you’ll see an option to “Mute this post.”

Muting will take the post out of your stream, never to return (unless you go to the person’s page, find the post, and unmute it).

Why bother? Why not just let the post scroll by uninterrupted on its way to obscurity on its own? Just letting it scroll by is easier than trying to manage each post.

Well, muting actually becomes more interesting when applied to a post that you are interested in, because it also mutes notifications related to the post. Let’s say you read an interesting post and added a comment. Maybe it’s a popular post and a bunch of people are commenting, but you’ve said your piece and you don’t really want to be notified every time someone adds their two cents.

Mute that post and all those notifications disappear, keeping your attention focused on other things. And, not to worry, if you’ve said something particularly witty or insightful, folks can drag you back to the comment stream by mentioning you (with the + sign) in the comments. Those notifications will still come through.

Blocking

Spam is everywhere, including on Google+. When a spammy person adds you to their circles, their stuff doesn’t show up in your stream. But you do get a notice that so-and-so is sharing with you, and their posts can make their way into your “Incoming” stream. So, if the person looks annoying or spammy, just block them. It’s easy.

You have two ways to block someone. Right from a post pulldown menu (the same place you muted the post before), and also on their profile page.

Now, you’ll never hear from them again (at least on Google+). If you’ve mistakenly blocked someone or for some reason want to access those people, Google+ keeps them in a “Blocked” circle for you. Moving them out of the circle “unblocks” them.

Use these tools to help manage the signal to noise ratio on Google Plus.

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How to quickly setup a clean, clear, and complete Google+ profile

July 20, 2011 By 2 Comments

One of the first things you should do when you join Google+ is setup your profile. It’s the first thing all new people you meet on the platform will look at when deciding whether or not to put you in one of their circles.

If you use other social media platforms, like Twitter, LinkedIn, a blog, etc. this exercise will go very quickly. I’ll show you some ideas on which pieces can simply be copied into place here on Google+ – a simple mapping process will get you up and running with a decent profile in minutes.

1. Put in your name. There’s no need to think up a clever handle, and you had to enter your name as part of the setup process. So this step is already done!

2. Enter a tagline (Twitter). Copy whatever clever one-liner you worked up for your Twitter profile and paste it here. You can tweak it if you like, but chances are whatever you settled on for the limited field in Twitter is probably going to work fine here.

3. Add a profile photo (Twitter, LinkedIn). Don’t leave the mysterious shadow figure on your profile for even a minute. Take an existing profile photo from Twitter or LinkedIn or another service and paste it in here. I use the same profile photo for all social media services so I can be more easily recognized from platform to platform.

4. Add your introduction (Blog, LinkedIn). Copy this from your “About” page on your blog, or if you don’t have a blog copy the summary paragraph from your LinkedIn profile.

5. Put up your links (About.me). If you aggregate your social media profile links on a central page, like at the About.me service, you will have a good reference list for this part of the profile. If you don’t, just run down the basics here and fill in the blanks – Twitter, Blog, LinkedIn, Quora, etc.

6. Employment history and education (LinkedIn). This is an easy one. List the companies and college(s) from your LinkedIn profile. Leave out the details to make your profile cleaner. If someone’s really interested in the details, they can get all that over on LinkedIn, and you’ve already provided the link to that.

7. Something interesting (Twitter inspired). Here’s a chance to take advantage of all those skills you honed over on Twitter in order to be concise and engaging in a single sentence. This may take the most time to think up, but don’t sweat it too much. The first thing that comes to mind is likely going to be the most interesting bit of information.

8. Ignore this! Circle counts are not working on Google+. There is a known bug in circle counts not incrementing when you are added to circles. Don’t sweat it; it’ll get fixed eventually.

Now you’re ready to mingle. You have a clean, clear, and complete profile that hits all the highlights. Use this to get started, so you can begin posting and mingling right away. You can always update and tweak it later on as you see fit.

 

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2 Awesome Video Innovations on Google+

July 15, 2011 By 1 Comment

Google+ is innovative, true. But so are its users.

One innovation on Google+ is the ability to conduct multi-party video chats. While one-on-one video chatting has been around for a while on a number of platforms, multi-party conferencing can get complicated and expensive. Google+ offers a new model, and it’s free.

Google+ Hangouts

On Google+ video chats are called Hangouts. Up to 10 people can join a Hangout for a high-quality (assuming you have a decent Interent connection) video chat experience. What’s interesting is that the system displays the video streams in a new way.

In a Hangout, all the video streams are displayed in a sort of thumbnail view across the bottom of the screen. A single video stream is shown above that, on the main part of the screen. That main stream automatically switches to focus on the person speaking at the moment. This makes the platform very easy to use, more natural and engaging. Sure, there’s likely to be some snafus with this new approach. But there’s also sure to be some innovations. Here are two great examples that I came across.

The Internet’s First Google+ Hangout Game Show

+John Herman is an artist and writer, and emerging media consultant. He’s also a game show host. Check out what he did this last Monday, and plans to continue for the next few Mondays.

John hosted his first show and it seems like it was pretty fun for all who joined in. He’s going to keep at it every Monday for a while, so it’ll be interesting to see how things develop.

And a Yoga Class!

Also this week on Google+ – yoga! +Danielle Herman, a public school teacher, gardener and yogini used some of her summer vacation time to share her yoga expertise. And judging by the comments, it went over quite well, with new ideas brewing already on how to make it better.

Lots of excitement and ideas flowing

These experiments were well-received and there’s lots of chatter about how to improve, innovate, and experiment further. Here are some great comments from the posts related to these experiments:

“Bringing people together like this with G+ is amazing, truly an evolution of social networking.”

“I was astonished by how the technology has brought us to a new age.”

“Ok that was hilarious.”

So, people are there (on Google+), having fun, and trying new things. Time to get creative and innovative. Enjoy.

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6 Things Marketers Should Know About Google+

July 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The latest social network from Internet giant Google is making a grand debut. Word is that over 10 million people have rushed to the platform during its “field test” and most seem to have a very favorable first impression of the product.

So, how does the emergence of this new social media platform change the game for marketers? It’s certainly too early to say much for certain, but here are a few key points to know and consider.

1. There will be a special place for brands on G+, but it’s not ready yet.

Google+ is decidedly personal right now. There is no equivalent of a Facebook Page, but something along those lines is planned. Google asks that you wait, and they promise that it won’t be long. Some brands have jumped the gun and configured personal accounts as a brand account. It’s unclear how well that’s going over on the network, but in an environment that seems fundamentally tuned to keeping the quality of your social streams high, this may be a tricky approach. For now, you might be better off playing by the rules and setting up a personal account. This will help you get a feel for the environment, and an all-important end-user perspective.

2. There is a distinct vibe on Google+ right now.

It’ll likely change, but the combination of that new car smell and the excitement many feel from starting anew in a clean environment with a limited community give the place a definite tone. A lot of people seem energized simply by the ability to completely reboot their social media experience. A lot of people are exploring the service, testing things out – pushing and poking around, and sharing their experiences about Google+. It’s new to everyone, and that takes up a lot of the conversation right now. Some are so excited that they’ve picked up and move most (or all) of their social media activity to Google+ already. So, realize that the group seems a bit sensitive right now and is clinging to the honeymoon period pretty tightly. Aggressive tactics would likely backfire (even more than on other platforms). Of course, the tone will likely evolve as the network grows and changes (much to the chagrin of some early adopters).

3. Engagement is super-high, prepare to be a conversationalist

Conversations abound on Google+. Many posts have tons of comments. There are a lot of real conversations going on. Like blogging or Twitter in the old days. I think this has a lot to do with the unbridled enthusiasm for a new environment and the parts of the design that Google got right. It may be working better than Twitter since posts are not limited to 140 characters and conversations can be contained in a set of comments. Without a hashtag, DMs or some other effort it’s hard to have a long conversation on Twitter. It may be working better than blogs since there is no need to fill out a form to sign up to comment. It may be some secret sauce of the design that we can’t put our finger on yet, but whatever the case – engagements is high. Prepare to converse.

4. Influence may become even harder to measure

Measuring influence is always a challenge. Projects like Klout and PeerIndex have been making some inroads here, but this new platform throws a couple of monkey-wrenches into the mix. There is no API into the platform, the way the network works is different, and much of what’s going to be shared in the future could be in private circles. It’s going to be really hard, in the short term at least, to figure out any meaningful measures beyond how many circles someone is in. And even those numbers can be hidden by users if they wish.

5. Metrics largely disappear, but could come on strong later

Influence is always a challenge, but metrics are usually much easier to gather. Even when simple counts like how many circles someone is in are available, they may be misleading. Like Twitter, sharing is asymmetrical on Google+. And just because someone is in a bunch of circles doesn’t mean their posts are actually being viewed. What might get real interesting is if Google integrates Google Analytics into the service somehow in order to give users some view into what the traffic is like for individual posts, comments they make, or other activities on the platform. I wouldn’t be surprised if that were in the cards at some point, particularly for the brand pages. That could make metrics quite interesting and informative in the future.

6. Google+ is driving tons of blog traffic already

Several popular bloggers have shared that Google+ is the top referrer to their blogs, and has been pretty steadily over the last several days. Whatever drives the engagement on this platform, it apparently spills over to outside properties as well. This could make Google+ a key outpost for your company’s blog. Something to think about.

Get your feet wet

Given all of the above, the best approach right now is probably to simply jump in and learn the environment. Learn how it works. Explore the features. Figure out some people to follow and see what they are posting, and jump into some of the conversations. That’s probably a minimum requirement right now. Then, you can move onto experimenting with hangouts and huddles, photo and video sharing, and building out your profile.

Photo credit: kiwinz

Filed Under: Google+, Social media Tagged With: , , ,

How to add a Follow Me on Google+ widget to your WordPress site

July 13, 2011 By 5 Comments

The WordPress community is great. Google+ is barely two weeks old and there’s already a nifty plugin for the site.

Similar to the “Follow Me” buttons for Twitter and other sites, the Google+ plugin called GoogleCards by mabujo adds a simple way to allow your readers to follow you on Google+.

It shows your profile photo and name from Google+ as well as how many circles you’re in (follows, essentially) along with a button so that you can easily be added to the reader’s own Google+ profile.

And though Google+ is still early in its evolution and very limited in its release, this may be another nice addition to your WordPress site. Here’s how to install it.

Installation and configuration of the GoogleCards plugin

Updated: It seems the original developer has abandoned this utility, as it’s been broken for a while (photos and circle counts not showing properly). But another WordPress developer stepped up and issued a fix. Thanks Kai Thrun! His fix is posted here and seems to work fine. That’s the one I’m using on this site now.

The only difference is rather than searching for GoogleCards, you’ll need to upload the file from your local hard drive. (When you click on Add New,choose Upload, then browse to where you downloaded the .zip file and click Install Now. And then Ok. The rest of the steps are the same.)

Updated again (9/8/11): The original author is back on the job, and a new update was released. The steps below, as originally listed, work again. Enjoy!

First, go to Plugins menu on your WordPress dashboard and select Add New. Then type googlecards in the search box and click the search button.

Then click on Install Now. And then Ok.

Once it’s installed, click on Activate.

Now, you need to go to the widgets screen, found under Appearance, Widgets on the Dashboard.

From this screen, you need to drag the GoogleCards widget onto a sidebar. This will cause the widget to actually display on your site. Pick a good spot, maybe high up under your search widget (if you have one).

Lastly, you need to configure the widget with your own Google+ ID number (the default is for one of the Google founders, Larry Page).

Don’t worry, it’s easy to get. Just login to Google+ and view your profile. You’ll see the number neatly displayed in the URL, like so:

Copy that number and paste it into the Google+ ID field on the GoogleCards widget and hit Save.

Now view your site and viola! You’re done.

Filed Under: Google+, Social media Tagged With: , , , , ,
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